Easy Company Soldier (5 page)

Afterward, I stared at the embers deep into the night, trying, I suppose, to feel that sense of tranquillity I'd often felt out here as a kid, but I was never quite able to get there. It was as if I were being pulled toward something, some
place
—almost like these fingerling salmon that would instinctively swim to the sea each spring. Somehow, they just knew where they needed to be; just as, later on, they knew they needed to return to the river, the place where they'd started. Even if it meant swimming thirty-five miles upstream.

I slept back at the cabin. I left in the morning, before either my mother or father had awakened. I hadn't told them about my decision to become a paratrooper. But, like those salmon, I knew where I needed to be.

I reported for duty in Portland and was sent, by train, to Fort Lewis with a group of about a hundred other inductees. It was September 12, 1942. We arrived at 4:00
A.M.
and were told to report to an “indoctrination center.” My buddy in Astoria had been right: As we sat in the room, among the first questions we were asked was whether any of us wanted to become paratroopers. Some of the guys didn't even know what the officer was talking about. What the hell was a paratrooper? Then he explained the concept, about jumping out of an airplane behind enemy lines, then fighting. About how it took a special man to volunteer. About how it took five jumps to earn your wings; and if you refused to jump, you could be court-martialed.

“If interested, please stand up,” the officer said. Of the
hundred men, exactly two of us stood. Just down from me, still sitting, was a guy I'd known at the University of Oregon, Joe Montag.

“Well, so long, Malarkey,” he said. “I'll never see
you
again.”

Judging by the majority's choice, I figured I'd either gotten in with a group of really smart young men—or a bunch of namby-pamby chickens.

I was given a physical: five foot seven, 160 pounds. Good health. The other guy flunked his physical so it was just me heading to St. Louis, where I joined half a dozen other volunteers, including three who ultimately joined E Company, like me: Robert Rader, Don Hoobler, and William Howell. We were all on our way to a place called Toccoa, Georgia, where they'd separate the wheat from the chaff. The camp was located in the Chattahoochee National Forest, not far from a town called Toccoa, from which the camp got its name. It had been built specifically to form an experimental regiment that would feed into the Parachute School at Fort Benning, also in Georgia. About six thousand men were there. More than two out of three would either quit or be forced to quit. The rest would become paratroopers.

By the time I arrived, the regiment was pretty well formed and I was feeling a bit uneasy about fitting in. Newcomers were placed in W Company, a tented facility on the grassy slope of a hill just below the regimental medical-processing facility. We were a company in name only. The “W,” I learned, stood for either “welcome” or “washout” because as we were coming, a group of guys were going. “This serves as the regiment's in-and-out processing machine,” Burr Smith, a guy from southern California who'd been there a while, pointed out to me, “and it's a fast train in both directions.”

For all my bravado back in Astoria, nobody here knew me
from Adam. From the get-go I feared my “W” might mean washout. Once assigned to E Company, I was having trouble just getting my cot put together; what made me think I could qualify for this elite group of soldiers? I'd already shown my inexperience by running into an officer I'd known back at the University of Oregon, Eugene Brown, and calling him Eugene instead of saluting him.

What's more, I'd heard that the group of guys leaving had been booted because of their inability to run up and and down something called Currahee.

“What's Currahee?” I asked one of them in my usual low, almost gravelly voice.

“Screw you, pal,” said one them as he flung a duffel bag over his shoulder and headed out the door. Whatever it was, I guess he and it hadn't exactly hit it off.

That night, I would find out why. Currahee was a mountain, introduced to me by the first guy in E Company I became friends with. I was putting my shaving kit away on a shelf that had a photo of a young woman on it. I looked closer. Not only was she beautiful, but the name of the photo studio in the corner was familiar: wilson studio, astoria, Oregon.

“Who's the photo of?” I asked a guy nearby.

“My sister.”

“No kidding?” I said. “It was taken by Wilson Studio, in Astoria—where I'm from.”

His eyes widened. “I'm from right across the Columbia in Ilwaco, Washington. Rod Bain's the name.”

I was dumbfounded as we shook hands. Two thousand miles away and the guy bunking next to me was a ferry ride away from where I lived.

“Don Malarkey,” I said.

“Welcome, and we're not the only Northwesterners: The
guy on the other side of my bunk is Tom Burgess. He's from Centralia, Washington. And John Plesha's from Seattle. Rainier Valley. So, Malarkey, after dinner, how 'bout a run up Currahee so you can understand what you'll be up against at Camp Toccoa?”

That night, after dinner, we walked to the foot of the mountain. Burgess joined us. “Currahee,” said Bain, “is the measuring stick for us all. Quitting is a no-no. You quit and you qualify for ‘moonlight patrol.'”

“Moonlight patrol?”

“Yeah, you quit Currahee and the next night you're sleeping away, dreaming of Lana Turner or your girl back home, and you get a tap on your shoulder. It's time for a command performance up the mountain. You and a bunch of other quitters—under the watchful eye of some noncom who's already cranky because he's having to babysit a bunch of wimps in the middle of the night.”

If it was Bain's intention to scare me, it worked. It didn't help when, after a half mile up the three-mile-long logging road twisting through the pines, he and Burgess were gliding along and I was sucking eggs. Near the top, I thought I was going to lose my dinner. On the way down I thought I was going to lose everything I'd eaten since high school. It took about two hours, but, wheezing like an aging outboard motor, I made it.

At the bottom of the hill, Bain slapped me on the back in congratulation. As we bent over to catch our breath, he explained that “Currahee” was an Indian word that meant “standing alone.”

“The battle cry of the 506th,” he said, “is ‘We stand alone together.'” He lowered his voice a notch for dramatic effect. “Currahee!” he yelled.

“Currahee!” followed Burgess.

Sweat had matted down my curly blond hair. I was bent over, my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath, sweat dripping off my face. But hearing Burgess, I straightened up and, feeling like I'd somehow earned some tiny rite of passage, shouted my first battle cry.

“Currahee!”

That night, lying in my bunk, I wasn't thinking about being far away from Oregon or about how tired I was or about how a single mosquito—and there were squadrons of them at Toccoa—could spoil a night's sleep. Instead, I was thinking, what kind of a special group of guys was this that a couple of them—guys who didn't even know me—would run up a mountain just for my benefit? To help prepare me for what was to come? To welcome me in instead of trying to trample me down? It might have seemed a simple thing, but I've never forgotten that gesture. It was the first bonding experience with a group of men who would one day become known as the “band of brothers.”

The “band of brothers,” as we'd become known as after Stephen Ambrose's 1992 book of the same name, comes from Shakespeare's
Henry V,
1598:

Specifically, that label was given those of us in E, or Easy Company—decades after the war was over. The 101st Airborne Division, otherwise known as the Screaming Eagles,
began in 1942. The 82nd Airborne had been the first of its kind to train men in assault from the air. We were next. Maj. Gen. William C. Lee promised us that although the 101st had no history, we had a “rendezvous with destiny.” And a helluva rendezvous it would be.

Our 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment was one of three such regiments in the 101st, the others being the 501st and the 502nd. Each regiment had three battalions: A, B, and C companies were assigned to the 1st Battalion; D, E—that was us, Easy Company—and F assigned to the 2nd; and G, H, and I assigned to the 3rd. Easy Company, about 150 men strong, was divided into four platoons of 40 to 50 men each. I was in Easy's 2nd Platoon.

For Easy Company, virtually everything was at first some physical challenge: run Currahee three or four times a week; run a hillside obstacle course; over a stack of timber; under netting strewn with hog guts; through wooden chutes that left splinters in your hands; push-ups; sit-ups; windmills; somersaults; and do a forced march on Friday nights, starting out at five miles and adding five miles each week until the grand finale—a fifty-miler. No talking, no smoking—tough, since nearly all of us smoked like chimneys—no food, no water, and no stopping. Other companies didn't require such strictness. Other companies didn't have ambulances following them on their forced marches.

Then, I soon realized, E Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, wasn't like “other companies.” That's mainly because we were led by Capt. Herbert Sobel, the man who demanded the fifty-milers, the hog-guts-in-your-face obstacle courses, and the no-blinking-on-a-run-or-I'll-kick-your-ass rule on the Currahee runs.

“The men of Easy Company do not quit,” he'd yell on our way up that mountain. “Do you understand me?”

At times, he'd have officers sweep through the ranks—guys like Lt. Dick Winters, who always obeyed Sobel's orders but wasn't totally sold on the man—checking our musette bags and canteens for food and water. Sobel had it in for Winters—was tougher than nails on him, almost as if Winters were one of “us” instead of one of “them.”

After a week of sheer hell, Sobel would announce that we were being rewarded with a big dinner. You'd be halfway through your spaghetti when he'd walk in. We'd all snap to attention, and he'd say, “Gear on. We're going up Currahee. Now! Heigh-ho, Silver!”

Even in our “down” time, Sobel would find ways to make us miserable.

“Sobel reminds me of that joke about the captain of the slave galley,” I told Skip Muck, a kid from New York I'd met, one afternoon as we were shining boots in the barracks. “First mate tells the guys who're rowing, ‘Got good news and bad news for you, fellas. Good news is we're taking a day off tomorrow. Bad news is the captain wants to go waterskiing.'”

“You got that right, Malark,” Skip said.

E Company inspections were legendary at Toccoa. Sobel would call them at any odd hour, bursting into the barracks with the surprise of some sneaker wave back home that'd sweep a fisherman right into the surf. Two weeks later, some crabber'd think he'd gotten the catch of a lifetime, pull up his ring, and find a body crawling with Dungeness crabs. At Toccoa, guys would disappear just like that, never to be heard of again. Couldn't cut it. Couldn't cut Sobel. Maybe both. One of them was a guy Skip and I knew, Bill Dickerson, from
Tacoma, Washington. Nice guy. I remember mugging for a photo with Skip and me in a doorway, pretending we were going to jump out of a plane. That's the closest Dickerson would get to jumping from a plane, though. Soon he, like dozens of others, was washed out to sea. Just like that.

Once, Sobel paid a surprise visit and confiscated all sorts of personal property from guys, everything from unauthorized ammo to a lifetime supply of rubbers to a can of peaches. Guys who'd disliked him before that incident hated him after it.

“Like to kill that SOB,” you'd hear some guy mutter, “and I ain't kiddin'.”

Sobel would look you eye to eye—he was tall—and start sneering at you and raising his voice just enough so you wanted to start choking him. “Dirt on your rifle's hinge spring, Malarkey. Weekend pass revoked.”

Lint on your chevrons.
Revoked.
A rusty bayonet.
Revoked.
Don't like the sound of your name.
Revoked.
Sometimes, when one or two people had screwed up, he'd punish the whole bunch. There'd be some big dance we were all going to in town.
Sorry. No passes.
It was as if he were just trying to get our goat. Or maybe it was something deeper meant to make a bunch of misfits into a single unit.

He loved to humiliate us—or seemed to. Sometimes, as punishment, he'd make a guy sleep with a machine gun. Or go dig a six-foot-by-six-foot hole in the ground, then fill it back in. Jimmy Alley was always digging holes. When inspecting our 2nd Platoon, Sobel would come up to this kid named Frederick Belke. Seventeen years old. Never shaved in his life. Didn't need to; all he had was peach fuzz. Sobel would announce to the whole platoon that Belke was restricted for being unshaven so we all were restricted. Finally, we practically tied the kid down and shaved him ourselves.

Some called Sobel the Black Swan because he was darkcomplected and ran like a duck, legs flapping here and there, but I admit,
he did
what
we did.
He'd get to the top of that mountain—frankly, not easy for him, but he'd never quit—with a stopwatch in his hand. “This might be good enough for the rest of the 506th, but it's sure as hell not good enough for Easy Company!”

In a strange way, it kind of filled you with pride. You got the idea he was hardening us for tougher times to come. That he truly wanted us to be the best of the bunch—and believed we could be. We wrestled, boxed, did decathlon events—and ran, ran, ran. Soon we established the finest fitness record in the 506th, but when some colonel from elsewhere saw the results, he couldn't believe it. So they sent this high muckety-muck from Washington, D.C., to retest us. We got an even higher score.